The Onion’s Latest Joke: Taking Over Infowars

[00:00] Investing with Schwab is like spending a Saturday at a great farmer's market. You can fill your reusable tote with a bit of everything. Maybe you go for some free-range, self-directed investing. Or perhaps you pick up a few farm-fresh trades while you peruse. You can even get help from a dedicated advisor. That's full-service wealth management. Mix, match, and change your mind whenever you want. Because at Schwab, you can invest your way. No matter your goals or appetite for investing, [00:30] place. Visit schwab.com to learn more. [00:35] From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. This is not a joke. The satirical outlet The Onion is set to take over InfoWars, the site that is run by notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Yes, you heard that correctly. Last Thursday, The Onion launched its own version of InfoWars, the infamous online hub of misinformation created by Alex Jones. The takeover has been years in the making. [01:04] American conspiracy theorist and internet broadcaster Alex Jones has been ordered to pay Sandy Hook families more than $1.5 billion. That's because he perpetrated for years the lie that this shooting was a hoax, that the people were actors. After losing two defamation cases, Jones was ordered to pay more than a billion dollars to the families affected by the Sandy Hook school shooting.

[01:34] "The Sandy Hook Massacre." [01:36] Unable to pay, Jones' assets, including Infowars, were put up for auction. He's no longer going to own Infowars, which is this conspiracy empire he's really used to poison the public discourse. And then, in the surprise twist... The Onion, the satirical news outlet, has won a bankruptcy auction to take control of Infowars. The Onion stepped in. They announced plans to convert Infowars into a parody of itself and committed to sharing proceeds from the new venture with the Sandy Hook families. [02:06] Hi, everybody. It's Tim Heidecker here. I'm broadcasting now live. Thank you for joining me. We have major, major announcements to go through here. Now, after nearly two years, the Onion parody of InfoWars is live. Make no mistake, we will be the new InfoWars. Today, we speak with Onion CEO Ben Collins and comedian Tim Heidecker about what they plan to do with InfoWars and why they fought so hard to take control of it. [02:36] It's Tuesday, July 7th. [02:48] Hi, Ben. Hey, how's it going? I'm Rachel Abrams. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. Thanks for being here. Thanks for doing this at all. Yes. Early last week, I sat down with Ben Collins, the CEO of The Onion. I got to practice my daily hmm. Hmm. And actor and comedian Tim Heidecker. Tim, am I allowed to ask you to just give me your Alex Jones impression?

[03:08] Yeah. I'm like a trained SEAL now. We knew that was the case. And frankly, that's why we're talking about it. Collins and Heidecker were preparing for The Onion's imminent relaunch of InfoWars. The Onion has been around for almost 40 years and became infamous for skewering everything from American politics to pop culture. [03:27] In a lot of cases, people need catharsis. Just, like, give people a... [03:31] Oh, you're not nuts. This feeling of like, you're just not insane. The shit that's going on is insane, but you're not nuts. [03:37] Collins, who became CEO in 2024 after a decade as a reporter, has revitalized The Onion in a short amount of time. And we've leaned into that as hard as we can. It's why we're the, I think, fifth biggest newspaper in the United States now. [03:49] I started my conversation with Ben and Tim by asking why they decided to remake InfoWars. [03:55] You know, I used to be a reporter, and I was covering stupid stuff on the internet when I was a little wee baby reporter guy at the Daily Beast now 11 years ago. Mm-hmm. [04:03] And my friend's girlfriend was shot and killed on live TV, on Facebook, actually. She was the first person killed by a guy wearing a GoPro. It was brutal. It was just really bad. And then, like, when you Googled my friend's name, the thing that would come up was that he wasn't real or didn't exist and all this stuff. Like, there was – the internet had just started to show the cracks of where we were headed. So I started covering that. [04:26] for a living. You know, I wound up covering Alex Jones's trial in NBC News, and I remember sitting there [04:31] When the judgment came down, [04:33] it became clear that he was going to have to owe these people a billion dollars. [04:36] And, uh, [04:38] He said, I'm not paying any of this. You guys know you're not going to receive a penny of this.

[04:42] And I was like... [04:44] Hey, dude, I think you gotta pay money. [04:48] Even after I got this gig, I didn't quite know about all the details. And there's a great documentary about it, The Truth vs. Alex Jones. And I sat there, watched that, and just my blood boiled. I couldn't believe what he had subjected those poor people to. Which we know, of course, he not only accused the Sandy Hook shooting of being fake, he accused the parents of being actors. His listeners harassed them. Some of them had to move. Yeah. Alex Jones, as we know, was ordered to pay more than $1.4 billion in damages. [05:18] money. Can you just, Ben, tell us what happens after that vis-a-vis your interest in The Onion? Sure. We saw it was for sale in Forrest on like Blue Sky. There was somebody that clipped out a newspaper ad because you have to advertise a bankruptcy auction, which sounds weird. But it said like, you know, get Alex Jones' armored truck or whatever. So I started making some phone calls and I was like, [05:41] Does this mean Infowars is for sale? And they were like, yeah, it does. You get the IP if you want. [05:45] And I should figure out what to do, because I had obviously never purchased something at a bankruptcy auction. So I had to, like, learn some stuff. And we're like, OK, well, we can look at this and I think we can pull this off. So we get excited to bid on this thing. And the bidding is on, I think, November 14th of 2024. And what happens on November 5th of 2024 is Donald Trump is elected president of the United States. So people are wondering, like, should we do this? Is this a safe thing to do?

[06:15] got his start in antiporess there were so many people tied up in those worlds so people were spooked and uh we just had to make a decision and i just realized that i can't imagine other people had the gumption or just like time in their lives to take on alex jones's harassment campaign so i was like okay you know i'm mad my word we're gonna go through this and we put down her bid and um [06:39] And then we won. And then Alex absolutely lost his mind. I remember him calling Steve Bannon on air and being like, Steve Bannon being like, what the fuck is going on? Like on the phone on air on your fores as it was like he was panicking. The funniest part is he had never heard of The Onion until he bought it. You're kidding. He said that? [07:09] Got that judgment, right? So at this point, when you were trying to purchase his assets, his company, was the idea to take it over and give money to the families in some way? Yeah, that was the immediate argument when I presented to my team. I was like, you know, we could spend $2 million on Facebook ads and make $2.1 million in Onion merch or something. Or we can do this really good thing and hope people come along for the ride. And that's what we decided to do. And we, look, we... [07:38] I have no idea if I would do it again, but I think I would because it's been this gigantic pain in the ass in my life. And it's been very scary. And we've had the dogs calling us from him and all of his weird psycho. Alex Jones has come after both of you personally, I believe. Oh, in the best possible way. I find it incredibly amusing for the most part. Yeah. Because he's discovered my body of work.

[07:59] Like you said, he didn't know The Onion, and then he found Tim and Eric's stuff from 15 years ago. And, you know, if you haven't seen some of that, it is pretty out there. It's pretty weird. But it's all coming from a place of absurdity and a place of silliness. But he took it all out of context and basically thought that we were some kind of literal demons from hell. Yeah. So you make a bid for The Onion. It goes through some legal wrangling in the courts. Now... [08:25] You have, I believe, celebrated the takeover. I know that you guys are treating it like a fait accompli. You're about to launch. But what is the current status? Just to be clear, like you have not officially taken over in the sense that like you can't go into Alex Jones's studio right now in Austin and like start broadcasting from there. Yeah. [08:42] So last August, there was an emergency stay put in place where it says like the receiver cannot sell these assets until we rule on this. The receiver is the guy in charge of dispensing all of these assets. And then Alex Jones said that he was going to shut everything down. Alex Jones's goal, by the way, is to render these assets valueless so he can buy them back for pennies. I don't accept that because that means these families will never get anything. [09:12] up from you. I know you can't sell it, but it doesn't say anything about this. And the receiver is like, yeah, I guess that's a good point. My goal is to keep the value of the assets up and make the families happy. And so we're moving this forward. And part of why we're trying to do this is to keep the value of this asset alive. [09:26] By making fun of this thing, we were reminding people like, hey, it has value on the planet Earth and it has value to us. And, you know, we would love to take this over and give these families. They haven't received a penny from this guy. And it's been four and a half years since the judgment and 10 years since they sued him. So.

[09:43] They need this cash, and we would love to get them some. How did the families react when you first... [09:48] told them that you wanted to take this horrific tragedy and make it into a comedy website? The first call was weird because I was like, I work at The Onion. I used to cover this stuff. So a couple of these families knew who I was. [10:00] And they were like, let me think about it. And then they came back and they were like, now that I thought about it, I see the vision, you know, because their goal has always been, you know, make it so he can't do this to any other family ever again. This like double whammy of American life that is you just lost your kids in a tragedy. And now I'm going to tell everybody they never really lived or they're they're still alive. And they graduated from high school. That's the thing that these people say now. [10:26] And, [10:27] I, [10:28] The strength of these families is absurd. Like you've met these people. They are the strongest people I think I've ever met my entire life. [10:36] And then we had this, like, really beautiful phone call with him maybe a month ago where— The two of you. Yeah. It was us and the Onion writing staff. Yeah, everybody. Yeah. And then I think, like, six or seven of the families. Mm-hmm. [10:48] And, um... [10:50] I don't know. A bunch of people left overtly crying in the office. It was weird to go into a thing where we thought we were going to say thank you for letting us do this. And they were like, no, no, no, no, I don't think you understand. Thank you for doing this.

[11:20] But nevertheless, he is starting to do the same thing he's done before, right? And we don't know how big he's going to be. So I just sort of wonder, like, if he's already out there, like, still doing his thing, like, how will you determine whether this effort is successful? [11:33] That's a good question. I mean, I tuned in the other day just because I hadn't done the impression in a while and I wanted to listen to his voice. And I literally opened it up and he was talking about Charlie Kirk faking his own death. I was like, right. And we're doing a little bit of a similar take on that, on our parody of it. I mean, he is extremely diminished from where he was six years ago, 10 years ago. [12:03] I agree with you that he can build it back up, but that's America. [12:06] We should also note that the core of Alex Jones is a pills selling machine. It is. Well, just to be really clear about what you mean here is that he has a part of his business where he sells products to people. And in some cases, those products are to solve issues that he brings up on his show that might not be actual evidence based issues. A nuclear war is imminent, therefore, by my iodine. Stuff like that. Right. I also just have to point out, did you guys see, I think it was New York Magazine, but I can't remember. Somebody years ago did a quiz. [12:36] this product from Gwyneth Paltrow. Right, sure. And it was very hard to tell the difference, so I don't want to make it seem like it's singular to Alex Jones. No, no, but... [12:44] I mean, she's not advocating for the harassment of parents. I think that's the difference, is you can do whatever you want to sell products. Once you start selling products on...

[12:52] as a direct response immediately after a mass shooting and started demeaning the people who are victims of that mass shooting. That's to me. [13:00] I don't know if I'm crazy here, is a step too far. The two of you have done a very good job of articulating, I think, what you think the core of Alex Jones's product empire and also website is. You've also explained a lot about The Onion and what sort of makes The Onion The Onion. Can you help me understand how does InfoWars fit into the core DNA of The Onion? [13:22] So The Onion, in my opinion, has always been the best at it. [13:25] going after the dominant mode of media at the time. We always go after the way people actually get their information. [13:33] And this was a, you know, a shot across the bow. It's a little bit bigger than what we usually do in the sense that we're directly going after the information war people who are trying to make you feel bad about everything you do so you can buy a supplement. But that's how everything operates. You see like, you know, RFK who is carrying around sauerkraut and talking about peptides and all these other things like the current du jour addiction of people who subscribe to things on the Internet. [14:01] obvious opportunity to take this model that was invented, like really [14:05] not invented, but perfected by Alex Jones, and say, let's just lay it all bare. [14:17] After the break, we talk about what it is like to make comedy in this political environment.

[14:23] We'll be right back. [14:39] So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94% of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. [15:09] you [15:09] I'm Dani Blum, a journalist at The New York Times. I spend a lot of my time reporting on GLP-1 medications. People call them weight loss drugs. They are doing so much more in the body, and there's a lot of hope pinned on them. I am spending part of truly every single workday making sure that I am up to date on the latest science. I really want to make sure that I am talking to the leading researchers, keeping an eye on trial results, and that I'm talking to people who are on these medications to learn more from them, [15:39] really messy and murky and shifting science into a way that people can understand, it's really important to have evidence-based answers to some of the questions that people have, especially about something as vital as a medication they're taking. That's what you get when you subscribe to The New York Times. If you already subscribe, thanks. If you'd like to, go to mytimes.com slash subscribe.

[16:07] I want to talk about comedy, not just Infowars comedy, but just sort of more broadly comedy in the Trump administration. A lot of comedians have said, and I've heard you guys discuss this, that satire is really hard in the Trump administration, which is I've never quite understood exactly why. And I feel like it's not the perspective that you guys have taken. And so I wonder if, Tim, you can explain what you think the opportunity is for comedy that other comedians who say that are missing. [16:37] You try to get to very universal, you know, human feelings. I'm not trying to just go like, ha ha, look at Trump's orange complexion. I want to get into like, what is it about being a human being that gets you to the place where you're doing that to yourself? And I want to try to do that in an entertaining or funny way. I think it's also okay to, at this moment in time, it's enough to just go, like whatever the debacle is this week, [17:07] I think it's enough right now. You can just go [17:12] I think that's crazy. And if you can try to do it in a funny, witty way... [17:17] at least people out there looking for signals that they're not alone can get something. They can get like, okay, [17:26] I'm not crazy. That's crazy. I want to ask you guys, though, like the way you are describing what you're doing does not sound ideological. But just to push back a little bit, like I went to the Onion website earlier today and there's like a zillion headlines about Trump and RFK Jr., Ken Paxton. Yeah. And I'm somebody who's read The Onion. I know that you made fun of Biden. I know that you make fun of Democrats. I get that. But there's something called the Babylon Bee, which for people that don't know, it is very funny stuff.

[17:56] as like the onion for conservatives, basically the implication being that you guys have a liberal ideological bent. Right. And I think that certainly in this moment, you could get that impression looking at the onion website. I want to understand, like, how broad are you trying to appeal in terms of an audience? [18:13] I would just say that I don't think about an audience often. I just try to express what's inside of me out into the world. And it will be ideological a lot of the time because I have a point of view. But I will say Infowars isn't going to be overtly political necessarily and maybe not [18:34] Really at all. I mean, we're making fun of food influencers and we'll be making fun of people that certainly voted for, you know, Mom Donnie in New York, you know, and are friends of mine. Like you've got to, of course, look at the world around you and see things that you kind of cringe at, even though you might ideologically align with them. And we're not going to be afraid to do that. But we're not interested in punching down. We're not looking at making fun of swaths of people because we're essentially scared of them. [19:04] Yeah. The most recent takedown request we got from a politician was from a very prominent Democrat. You know, that's – we really do hammer all sides. The Democratic Party is really upset at us because they think that we – [19:14] sank Joe Biden's 2024 campaign. Because you didn't cheer him on? Is that the idea? Yeah. Okay. And I'm not going to ever step in on that sort of thing ever. I wonder if you guys succeed, if the website takes off, besides the financial benefit of succeeding, whatever that looks like, whatever your metrics are, just what do you think you will have accomplished besides sidelining Alex Jones, besides making him less offensive or powerful? I mean, creating another place for quality art

[19:44] to exist that is pretty damn independent. I mean, this is one of the few bastions of not this monopolized super companies that we're having to live with. So what we hope to have accomplished in, let's say, five years is we've retrained people's brains to think of Infowars meaning something fundamentally different and separate it from that ghoul. If he wants to tell people about [20:12] Charlie Kirk faking his own death or something. He's free to do it on the side of the highway. You know, everything about Inforced was horrible, except the branding and the catchphrase they came up with. And their catchphrase is, there's a war on for your mind, which is just a perfect sentence. It's a beautiful sentence, right? And... [20:29] That will remain a thing that we do. [20:31] Basically like a mission statement or, you know, something to point at where there has been a war on for your mind for the last 10 years. There's no question about that. Like we have lived through that. And I would say normal people have lost in part because they didn't know they were in a fight. And we're going to give people the ability to make fun of the processes and the ways people get information. [20:52] That's going to be the through line that gets us through this. And like characters and ideas and things are going to build out of that. We are constantly being inundated with a bunch of insane garbage and bullshit, frankly. And that bullshit had no counterweight. And we're going to try to do that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think sorry to interrupt you, but I've been thinking over the years a lot about. [21:11] darkness and comedy and death and comedy and it is a way to like survive the chaos of the world.

[21:20] On a very deep level, like the comedians, the writers, whoever, creatives that go into those dark places are doing it at a service for themselves to sort of exercise the fear of these real things. And then that gets received by an audience. And I think it does a service to make them feel like, OK, this is something that happens and we have to laugh about it. [21:49] just like making you feel like, [21:51] All this crazy shit is hanging over our heads. But we shouldn't be afraid of it all the time. [21:59] Ben, Tim, thank you both so much for joining us. Thank you. I really appreciate it. [22:10] After we spoke to Ben and Tim, we reached out to representatives for Alex Jones to ask for comment about the Onions takeover of Infowars. But they did not respond. [22:21] We'll be right back. [22:39] This is Maurice Chema, the host of a new podcast from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and The New York Times. [22:45] Last year, I spent three months embedded with a capital defense team. Their client had been on death row for more than 30 years, and now his execution date had been set. I followed along as the lawyers tried to prove something nobody had successfully done in three decades, that one of Texas' most notorious serial killers was actually innocent. The Last 12 Weeks. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[23:12] Here's what else you need to know today. Calls mounted on Monday for the resignation of Graham Plattner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, after a former girlfriend accused him of rape. In an interview with Politico, the former girlfriend, Jenny Rassicott, described an incident during which Plattner let himself into her home and forced himself on her, despite her repeated pleas for him to stop. In a social media post, Plattner denied the allegations and said he would take time to, quote, [23:42] on the path forward. Both parties see Maine as a battle in the midterms, and a deciding race over who will control the Senate. [23:51] Prominent Democrats withdrew their endorsements of Plattner after the allegations surfaced on Monday. [23:57] including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Representative Ro Khanna, and Senator Ruben Gallego. [24:02] The Senate Democratic campaign arm [24:05] which had opposed Plattner in the primary, also called for him to quit, and pledged to withhold financial support from his campaign if he remained in the race. [24:15] Bye. [24:16] Thank you. [24:17] Today's episode was produced by Caitlin O'Keefe and Chris Benderev. It was edited by Mark George with help from Ben Calhoun, Michael Benoit, and Paige Cowett. [24:26] and contains music by Pat McCusker, Alicia Ba'itub, and Marian Lozano. [24:31] Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

[24:46] That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow. [24:56] I'm Gilbert Cruz. This week on the Book Review Podcast, we celebrate America's 250th birthday with historian Jill Lepore. You know, the 18th century is a very kind of carnival-esque world where people love to celebrate. Plus, the books you won't be able to put down this summer. To me, a beach read is an escape, and it's a book that takes you someplace else. Listen to the Book Review wherever you get your podcasts. Music